Wayland, Mass., — February 08, 2010 — The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) announces a Call for Participation (CFP) in Phase 3 of the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) issued by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The CFP documents are available at:
http://earthobservations.org/geoss_call_aip.shtml.

AIP-3 will build on previous project phases and is coordinated with other GEO Tasks. Specific areas of emphasis for AIP-3 include increasing the capacity for GEOSS to support Societal Benefit Areas; building on the AIP Service Architecture and the GEOSS Common Infrastructure; and increasing availability of data in GEOSS in accordance with the GEOSS Data Sharing Guidelines. AIP-3 will be conducted in 2010 with support to the Earth Observation Summit, November 2010.

The AIP-3 CFP invites GEO Members and Participating Organizations to participate in activities involving: registering components and services; testing of services; and participating in refinement of Societal Benefit Area scenarios to guide testing, demonstrations and operations of the identified interoperable services.

CFP responses are requested by 3 March 2010. Organizations responding to the CFP should plan to attend the kickoff workshop to begin development of AIP-3 to be held 11-12 March 2010, at the European Space Agency facility in Frascati, Italy.

Discussion and clarification of the CFP will be the topic of several teleconferences before the Kickoff Workshop. Agenda and logistics for these teleconferences are posted at
http://www.ogcnetwork.net/AIPtelecons.

The point of contact for the AIP task is George Percivall
Email Contact.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at
http://www.opengeospatial.org.

GEO (Group on Earth Observations) is a voluntary partnership of 124 governments and international organizations, launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries. GEO is coordinating efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS. See
http://earthobservations.org/about_geo.shtml.